This Wikipedia article, and Wikipedia is MY fav for getting definitions, has this to say about Social Web. “The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web.”

I don’t think a huge number of people would disagree to the first line of this article. There are people who have told me over time, that Social means “interaction” and has nothing to do with software or the web. I agree with them in toto. Yet, a “Social CRM” did not come into the picture till Social Web got firmly rooted in minds and actions around the world, as a part of people’s lives.

With the Social Web, came a new level of interaction and interactivity between people. They discovered that this was a brilliant way to work and share their lives continually with a range of people, known and unknown. As part of sharing lives, trials and triumphs, discoveries and doubts, cusses and praises, started flowing across the internet stream.

People discovered, that somewhere here, was an influencing trend that needed to be tapped.

CRM,  or Customer relationship management (CRM),  as Wikipedia says in this article, “consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers.”

CRM (the software) has been around for a huge while now. It has moved from a cumbersome book-keeping process to a finely tuned piece of automation, that does allow companies to service their customers better.

The prime functions of a CRM are typically

1. Prospecting & Lead Generation
2. Continued touch-point with customers towards need fulfilling, trending & forecasting, and a higher level of structured engagement.
3. Complaint redressal and churn forecasting

A structured CRM process is a brilliant source of secondary data for marketing research services of an organization. And thats just the tip of a blasted huge ice-berg. Companies have fine-tuned CRM processes and systems to work in tandem for huge boost in efficiencies.

So why sCRM now?

As mentioned earlier, sCRM or Social CRM was born to tap a growing Social Web as a key point of continued interation, that served as a phenomenal pipeline of prospective customers.

Not only prospective customers, sCRM also looked to mine “influencer” patterns to decide what makes or mars a product or a service. Without really knowing it, this continued mining of various media online started revealing trends, patterns, structures, and bodies that probably at some time could be linked to a sale or lack of.

Where was sCRM actually born?

I would probably look upon Google’s context sensitive ad serving, as a FIRST in sCRM. Google actually understood that levels of interactivity and communication exchange would always be an exponential parameter to keep tapping, and introduced Adsense to address this constant interaction.

It monitored what you’re searching for, what you’re talking about, what you have discussed, and linked advertisers contextually to you. Thus, it provided much needed basis for monitoring HOW MANY PEOPLE ACTUALLY DISCUSSED A PRODUCT AND SERVICE OF YOU AND AROUND YOU.

And how was this addressed? Simple. Your communication just got displayed more than others depending on how many people shared a universe around you.

Now this was not really DIRECT, was it? It had to move into higher levels of commercialization (or keyword bidding, ad slot bidding etc).

Which meant that if you were in the, a domain, and ran a campaign to tap this universe that used your domain, you also had to contend with peripheral “chance” units that tried to eat into your domain. Finally things were always about buying keywords, related or unrelated, and displaying your communication on the off chance that it might result into a positive zap for you.

sCRM in todays era?

It’s all about monitoring social interactions on social sites. Its all about monitoring content and possibly, “adjectives” within content. For eg, I think PRODUCT X is NOT GOOD. It revolves around knowing spheres of influence that such innocuous statements can spread to. It revolves around knowing residual or “spread” points of such spheres of influences and influencers.

IMO, and I really haven’t evaluated any “sCRM” a brilliant sCRM should do all the above. And since it’s really the “S” that’s the hey here, some of the key matrices should include an emotional engine, an expression engine, and an adjective engine.

Finally, finally, finally. Till we actually figure out WHERE this has impacted a topline or a bottomline, we are just doing what my dear friend Bob Thompson calls  “Stalking”

In the next article, I’d like to discuss a really interesting debate I’ve been having with myself, and with some others on Twitter and other forums “Whether Recruiting on Social Web can be managed by an sCRM”.

One of the key things that came across is that there now seem to be a lot of entities who feel that brands can be made or marred online, via threads starting out from a simple 140 char string that goes “Product X is bad service, ppl, don’t touch it, #fail” or something like that. The people I met / interacted with over the last week all seem single-minded in terms of focusing on measuring the impact of such statements, and if possible, curbing or enhancing the impact that a negative or positive statement may have.

The key issue I keep wondering about is that of “monitoring” the impact of such statements. The tech aspects of collating or mining keywords related to a product / brand / service is not something that confounds me; anyone with half a grey cell can do it. What I really fail to understand is HOW such a statement and its impact on actual market spaces are measured. I can follow the threads of connect or discord around a product or service, but how do I actually check whether it has resulted in a SALE or LACK OF ONE.

One of the key posts that I HAVE to mention here in terms of its utter lucidity of thought and expression is Prem Kumars blog post on Social CRM. There seems to be a good thought stream out there, in terms of attempts to define spaces, approaches and potential outcomes.

Sugar CRM, the big daddy of all open source CRMs, in one of the versions I last checked, allowed you to run and track a (mailer or ad-serving) campaign online, as part of its offering. Now, while this cannot really be called “social CRM”, it does indicate a larger capability for a user to PUBLISH content to what goes collectively and even “loosely” under the garb of Social Media. Oracle, with their Social CRM App Suite seem to be prime, aggressive movers in this domain. As of now, it seems to be more of Sales prospecting and lead generation function.

So why has this become important?

It is kind of more or less accepted that 6 people out of 10 who spend at least 8 hours in front of a machine, are connected to a group / circle / network through a “social networking” site.

To most people, such sites serve as a connectivity platform, a “solidarity definition engine” or “recommendation engine” (I am buying X product, do you think I should go ahead?), a “Catharssis engine” (I HATE X or Y  services / person / product, and I think you guys should NOT use them).  And such innocuous posts sometimes show tendencies to spread, as the thread that permeates through venn diagrams that support inclusions or exclusions of people respond to it with myriad expressions of connect or disconnect.

Brilliant to do trending and checking.

But then, (as asked earlier) how do you actually monitor whether this has DONE  a sale or DENIED a sale ?

Social CRM and Reputation Engine Evangelists have their work cut out for them. The High Road for these people is not the trending and tracking, nor is it the mining of data and presenting an output.

Its the ACTUAL conversion to dollar matrices that are going to decide the KEY movers and FIRST players in the market that is BEGGING to be robbed.

Sanjeev Sarma

ps. I am currently exploring thoughts and concepts what SOCIAL CRM means to India and how Indian networks currently work in the digital space. I’ll share them soon as I’ve arrived at some gibberish I can pass off as intelligent.